Frankie Kolar’s Chocolate Cake Recipe

This week, for National Baking Week, British fashion & lifestyle blogger Frankie Kolar of ‘New Girl On The Blog‘ shares a very special celebration cake recipe with us.

Frankie Kolar 🙆

Hi guys! I am excited to be collaborating with you and I hope you enjoy this post. I ummed and erred for quite a while as to what recipe I should share with you. My first idea was to do a homemade victoria sponge versus a shop bought one and see how they compare. But that just didn’t have any sparkle or feel like a celebration of National Baking Week. So I thought I would share with you one of my favourite chocolate cake recipes, that I like to make for birthdays or other special occasions. The recipe comes from Miranda Gore-Brown who I have featured on my blog many times before. She was a finalist in the first series of The Great British Bake Off, her book Bake me a Cake as Fast as you Can was given to me as a present several years ago and it is just a brilliant no nonsense recipe book, with great twists on classic cakes, nothing too fiddly or complicated, but the recipes are tried and tested, they taste bloody good and they look super pretty!

Without further ado you will need:

3 tiered cake:

300g unsalted butter

300g caster sugar

90g good quality plain chocolate (melted)

6 large eggs

240g Self-raising flour

60g good quality cocoa powder

2 tsp of baking powder

2 x 20cm sandwich tins (you will have to use one tin twice to make 3 tiers)

Chocolate Buttercream:

300g unsalted butter

600g icing sugar (sifted)

350g 70% cocoa chocolate

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

50g cocoa

6 tablespoons of semi-skimmed milk

Now for the recipe….

Cream the (softened) butter and sugar until light and fluffy with a whisk. Then add the melted chocolate and continue to mix.

Add the eggs a little at a time beating / whisking well after each addition and checking they are fully incorporated before adding more to the mixture.

Sift the flour, cocoa and baking powder into a large bowl.

With a metal spoon or large palette knife, fold the dry ingredients into the cake mixture adding a little at a time. It is really important to add the dry ingredients with a metal spoon and not to keep whisking the batter as this will ruin your fluffy sponge and make it dense.

Divide the mixture equally between the three prepared tins (if you only have two tins then bake two cakes and remove from their tins to cool on a baking rack. Run one tin under cold water and re-line with fresh baking parchment before using to bake the third cake).

Before you put them in the oven, make a deep well in the centre of each cake, this allows for a more even bake and is important if you want to stack the cakes.

Bake the cakes in the middle of a preheated oven for approx 20 – 25 minutes or until springy to touch. Wait for them to cool down and put them on a wire rack.

Chocolate buttercream:

Beat the softened butter in a mixing bowl with the icing sugar, the vanilla extract and the milk, ideally with a hand whisk. Beat for 2 – 3 mins until the mixture is smooth, creamy and quite fluffy

Melt the chocolate over a pan of simmering water or very carefully in the microwave (in 20 second bursts – stirring before heating again).

Add the chocolate to the butter mixture and beat again – it will thicken the more you beat it!

Once the cakes are completely cold, sandwich together with a generous layer of chocolate buttercream and cover the top with buttercream. Decorate as you wish!

As you can see this is a really special cake and it went down a treat when I served it this weekend for my Aunt’s birthday! I decorated mine with wafer flowers that I found in Tesco, you could certainly be more adventurous – next time I think I will go for a pile of chocolate bars smashed up/crumbled/cut into shards and go for a super chocolatey experience!